Bandwidth Demand at American Universities

Robert Rwebangira writes: "There is an article in The New York Times (free reg required), discussing college students 'insatiable demand for bandwidth.' Of particular interest is the continuing prominence of file-sharing (inspite of the demise of Napster) and the amount of bandwidth consumed in even 'legitimate' activities. It seems students demand for bandwidth just keeps growing."

The same thing happens in the UK

[-douggy]

The university network run in the UK by Janet is in constant need of extra bandwidth be it for normal use (downloading linux isos from mirror.ac.uk) or for filesharing. Janet charges the UK unis around 2p per MB which can mount up if 1000s of users in halls are pulling stuff over the atlantic but interuni stuff is free.

Some universitys are now capping people at around adsl speeds to try and limit the charges

Re:And expect it for nothing

[1stflight]

Actually nothing in college is free, you really pay for everything. Spend 4 years in one and you'll be amazed at the high cost of everything. And with every year they're raising tuitions you ought to expect to get something for the thousands you're forking out each year ..and some each month.

Cut 'em off

[slutdot]

The universities really ought to set lower expectations on bandwidth by setting up QoS on their routers and allowing greater bandwidth from the classrooms and for web browsing in the libraries while dropping other unnecessary protocols such as those used by file sharing clients to almost non-existent levels. It's ridiculous that the universities allow file sharing to go on like they have. If the file is important to school work, the student can e-mail it.

Bandwith

[GenomeX]

I am a student at a university in South-Africa. From campus you are only allowed internet if you have an account for which you pay, and once you have this you are only allowed HTTP. I had to use tunneling to get on IRC for instance. Another thing is our whole university probably has about the same amount of bandwith in total as about 10 computers in the US use. This is not the universities fault, but rather out countries weak communications infrastructure and the fact that we have one telco with no compitition.
All you students and other people in the US should stop complaining, you have _loads_ of bandwith.

Packetshaper

[Jugomugo]

In the school system I work for, we use a product called Packetshaper. It allows us to block content, limit bandwidth etc... We just have all the bandwidth hogging apps down to less than bearable. Frees up the existing bandwidth nicely.

Bandwidth Cap and Upload/Download restrictions.

[akula1]

At my big ten University bandwidth use by the residence halls has been enough of a problem to cause our keycard access system to become DOS'd. You need keycards to buy food, enter buildings etc...

As of Monday 1.5 GB a week upload and 1.5 GB a week download restrictions go into place. You get two warnings if you exceed these limits and then your residence hall connection is yanked for a semester.

Re:IT's not just students

[baptiste]

I've got proof, at least from our university. We hit 400-500Mb/s usage on our Internet pipe. We put a bandwidth limit on the dorm network of 25Mb/s and overall usage dropped to 70-90Mb/s You do the math.

Re:The same thing happens in the UK

[leix]

Indeed. My college passes the 2p/MB charge onto students once they use more than 100MB. I find I rarely need any transatlantic bandwidth though given the good availability of mirrors and proxies. It's not unusual for me to use more than 100MB a day (mmm, dist-upgrade :) yet I only used 13MB of non-janet traffic last term.

My experience

[UnrefinedLayman]

At an unnamed university in California for whom I work, we have available at any given time ~ 40 Mb/s, with around 800 students living on campus. Normally our network situation isn't bad, but this last fall semester it got completely out of hand.

Of the 40 Mb/s, on average one-half of it would be in use directly by students in the dorms. At times, individual ports would be using 7-8 Mb/s, for as long as ten hours at a time. Eventually, it was decided that the impact on the university's bandwidth was affecting the educational functions of the campus network and all users were reminded by mail of the campus AUP for the network.

Students, being students, ignored it largely. The offenders who chose to ignore it and flaunt the fact they were ignoring it (anything above 2 Mb/s for over a few hours) were warned by mail individually, and after that, had their ports shut off and the MAC address of their computers banned from the DHCP pool, so no matter where they went (i.e., plugging it into their roommate's port), they were locked out. To receive service again, they needed to contact the student judicial affairs, which involved only signing an agreement not to be naughty again, with the threat of being kicked out of the dorms.

Long story short, a few people got their ports shut off and had to go through all the rigamarole. Most of they had no idea what they did was wrong, and didn't understand that leaving Kazaa, Morpheus and all their other file trading utilities on all day long was not only illegal, but the reason they received the notices in the first place.

It boggles my mind to think that these kids got into a university and don't understand that downloading the new N'sync album before it's on store shelves is illegal. Theft is theft, no matter who you're screwing over, but luckily, most will figure it out pretty quickly when the university tells them they were disconnected because Sony contacted the university about their particular computer, and yes, both the university and Sony would be more than happy to have them kicked off campus rather than deal legally with a pirate.

Some Universities are on top of the problem

[flsquirrel]

I attend a small state school of about 7000 undergrads(well, maybe not super small) and across the past year we have experienced precisely this problem. We have ethernet jacks in all the dorm rooms and everybody was running all the usual file sharing apps and it got to the point that you could not surf the web. The browser would time out because it went to long between packets! So the beginning of this year, A QoS package(I beleive we're running packeteer) was set up on our firewall to hunt down and block the packets for these programs as well as streamline some other network traffic and things have really cleared up. It's not blazing fast but surfing happens at a reliable 20k/second which is pretty snappy for browsing. Linux ISO's still take a while though ;-)

Things to think about in the current suggested solutions:

1. Limiting bandwidth to dorms just hurts students who don't run these programs! Yes there are some of us out here. The majority of students even in a small school can not be organized to stop running this type of software. They just bitch about the slow connection and keep right on downloading mp3's. At least that's what happened when our college tried it.

2. Blocking ports isn't effective. One of the earlier posts mentioned about how Morpheous and others seek out new ports. This makes normal port blocking on a router or firewall useless and may arbitrarily block other software that is not a problem but happens to use the same port. You have to have software smart enough to look at packet type/content to be effective.

3. QoS software works if you get the right package. I work for the computer center at my college and I know we went through a number of packages before we settled on one. But it really makes a difference and it's suprising how many people don't even know this sort of software exists.

Why do gamers have to get scrood?

[coding_ape]

They instituted a packet shaping policy at my school (Harvard) last semester to kill file sharing apps. It apparently does a lot of packet dropping on ports above 1000. Unfortunately for me, it destroyed my beloved Counter-Strike (300+ pings, 30-40% packet loss etc), along with every single multiplayer game I have tried. Now no one can convince me that CS is a bandwidth hog - the netgraph shows an average usage of a little over 1kb/s. It was designed to be played over a 56k.

Problem is, no one at school wants to hear about the problem; they just accept the collateral damage.

Does anyone know why/if this must be the case? i don't really understand why the software (perhaps Packetshaper as mentioned above) ruins the ping times - shouldn't it just drop enough packets so a TCP connection stays at a slow transfer rate?

Also, shooters generally use UDP to send the state information. I imagine file transfer programs use TCP. Not knowing much about the software, would it be possible to shape TCP connections and not UDP? (this would require reading the header)

Re:And expect it for nothing

[Kierthos]

I know what you mean. For several years now, the University of South Carolina (the original USC) has been charging all full-time students a "technology fee", which was ostensibly so the university could make all the dorm rooms "Internet ready". Needless to say, when they actually got within eyesight of that goal, they promptly decided to (1) build more dorms, and (2) redefine what the fee goes for.

What always bothered me most about the campus computer setup was how the Business Administration department got new computers every year while the C.S. department and College of Engineering had to wait every four or five years before they could get new computers.

Kierthos

Re:Cut 'em off

[invenustus]

Unless the users stop wanting to use filesharing, there will always be workarounds for all the filtering and blocking you can think of.

Wrong. At my university, they put in place an internal IP system such that dorm computers can ONLY be accessed from other computers inside the university. I can go on Morpheus and download, but anyone who tries to get files from me (and is outside the university) is going to get a failed download.

The system was not put in place to hurt filesharers, in fact, because we had that under control - if you exceeded 2 gigs a week downstream or 500 MB a week upstream you got shut off for 1 week - but because too many dorm computers were getting h4x0red and used for DDOS attacks, and the university was getting blamed. (Just be glad they did this BEFORE WinXP came out.)

There's a happy ending, though. Somebody set up a Neomodus DirectConnect [neomodus.com] hub on a dorm computer, and it spread like wildfire. The university only really pays for bandwidth that leaves the university, right? So now we share files to our heart's content, there's no upload or download restrictions, and the downloads are fast as all hell because they're all within the same organization.

not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

A month or so ago the company I work for did a network survey for a smallish private high school. They don't really have a coherent policy about what to allow, what not to, so the students run wild on-line.

Anyway, we put a packet sniffer on the network - turns out an average of 94% of their 10 Mbps pipe was being consumed by Kazaa traffic (port 1214 for those who are curious). That's a lot.

So, this being a high school (OK, perhaps a privileged one), I can see the bandwidth demand for universities only going up when students such as these finish high school and enter univerisity. Large amounts of bandwidth being readily available is gradually becoming the norm, at least here in North America.

Glenn

Re:Firewalls

[greyguppy]

I am currently at durham university.
The IT Service, only have a few college rooms cabled up. I had one last term, but not this term. What you get is 10Mb/s but ALL web is forced through a proxy server. This is not transparant, but rather blocking outgoing ports. MSN works if you put in the address of the proxy server, and audiogalaxy will figure out the proxy settings. You can ssh out, and in from/to anywhere, and with port forwarding, this is very useful. The ITS NT machines in the computer rooms, are even worse. You get a VNC server running all the time as a service. I am expecting a visit from the director of ITS dressed in a black suit brandishing a gun.
Noooo. Dont sho..........

Re:Bandwidth Cap and Upload/Download restrictions.

[kenthorvath]

My university has similar restrictions, I believe the quota is 1 GB /week or so and 400 MB upstream. However internal bandwidth is not counted so with a little help from Direct Connect [ned-modus.com]. We were all sharing a lightning fast connection to a P2P system with approximately 5-6 TB of files! In fact, We have almost every movie, song, and video game on this server with little or no remote queueing. In fact, the university not only turns a blind eye to this type of behavior, but I've been told by some of the higher ups that it is the best thing that could have happened to the university financially. Legality is hardly an issue because only university computers can connect to the server. It's a great system.

Re:Bandwidth Cap and Upload/Download restrictions.

[zhensel]

We have a sensible system at my Big 10 university (UIUC). 750 MB per day limit, with rate limiting kicking in as you approach the limit - 1.5 mbps at 80% of the limit, 128kbps after hitting the limit, 32kbps if you go to, I believe, 150% of the limit. Works much better than the system they had at the beginning of the year: contacting students if they exceed the limit and shutting down their connection for two weeks in combination with disciplinary action should they repeat the offense. I'd wager that the amount of time they save with the automatic system saves enough money to afford any extra bandwidth used by students with the new system.

Re:Morpheus is the killer

[PhoenxHwk]

Blocking Kazza/Morpheus and co is tough since it'll switch and seek out other ports

No it doesn't! Just block destination port 1214 and they can log in and search, but can't download squat because everyone else's Morpheus copy is listening on 1214. I did it to my bandwidth-hog roommate and we're lag-free all the time now.

Re:Morpheus is the killer

[cmkrnl]

Yes idiot, it would also make the owners of the campus infrastructure responsible and therefore liable for copyrighted material exchanged through such a facility.

Plausible deniability is an defence when its a bytestream crossing a network. Impossible when its on college owned and managed P2P server.

Never mind the ethical/politcal considerations of some of the material transferred.

Curmudgeon

A side effect...

[Shoten]

I did a security assessment at a large university late last year, and found something astonishing. The number one expenditure of time for the computer security staff was dealing with cases of "copyright infringement" from the representatives of record companies. And I mean, it was something like 80% of the manpower. What was also infuriating was that a lot of these cases involved MP3s that had been posted by the band to their own website (that week that I was onsite, most of the warnings given to the university had to do with a song by Incubus, if I remember correctly, that had been downloaded from the official Incubus website.)

No one seems to have mentioned this yet

[Wyzard]

At my school (Lehigh University), we address bandwidth problems this way...

Each student (each MAC address, really) is allowed to transfer one gigabyte within a 12-hour period. If you go over the limit, you get put in a "penalty box" (basically sub-58k speeds) for a while until your transfer total for the past 12 hours is under a gig. Uploads and downloads are counted separately, and transfers that don't go off-campus don't count at all. One of the university's servers holds a list of what addresses are in the penalty box, and what their transfer totals are.

This is quite effective - it gives each student a reasonable amount of bandwidth, and it only punishes those who actually use too much of it. And our 45mbit internet connection is rarely maxed out.

Packetshaper, QOS works

[Jay Tarbox]

These two products do wonders for bandwidth hogs, QOS Works [sitaranetworks.com] by Sitara also has a built in HTTP cache. Packeteer's Packetshaper [packeteer.com] does the same thing (without the cache). Initially you simpy plug them into your LAN and they monitor the types of traffic for a while then provide you with charts and graphs. You choose what types of traffic to give how much bandwidth. If some new hog show up you find out pretty quickly and can limit it easily. Really slick products. Can be costly though.

At my big school...

[crashx99]

At a big upstate NY school, we have had massive problems with that. It was mainly Morpheus and Kazaa, and I used to work for the computing consultants and I would get a LOT of calls in about how little bandwith kids in the dorms were getting. I personally in my dorm couldn't even check slashdot because it was so bad, and our school has numerous OC3's too! It was a painful experience, but the school just send out mass emails about how to turn off file sharing in Morpheus and it made it a WHOLE lot better. I myself have been a bandwidth hog (using over 2 gig's a day, but rarely) but no, these kids are even worse with their MP3's. And it's even harder to tell my roommates to not do that stuff because it hurts everyone else. And yes, We have major companies down our throats... All the time.

A little UK university history

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I am at cambridge, each department/college has to pay for its bandwidth costs.

Yep, that kicked in around the very late 90s (until which point JANet had been charging flat rate, or the University Computing Service had been absorbing the variation, but either way the individual colleges and departments didn't take the hit).

Perhaps slightly surprisingly, it wasn't the zillions of us playing Quake II over the 'net that did it. We were generally responsible enough to avoid doing so at peak times and keep it to the evenings and weekends, and many college computer officers had an informal policy of allowing such use as long as it was fair and didn't disrupt legitimate academic things.

Also perhaps surprisingly, this all predates things like Napster. Mass music interchange wasn't going on then on the scale it was until a few months ago.

What did it was the Warez servers blatantly running on university networks. They knew where they were, of course, and for legal reasons closed them down every now and then. But a certain type of hax0r dudez just kept abusing the system. So, now small groups or individuals get charged, caps are in place, traffic is presumably monitored, yada yada.

Sadly, and as all-too-usual, the irresponsible and downright illegal behaviour of a few has now impacted the facilities available to the rest.

Penn State

[jdc180]

Penn State recently capped downloads. There's and article here [psu.edu]. The interesting thing is the fact that 247 students(1.6%) use 46% of the bandwidth.

A Student's Perspective

[Destroyer_of_worlds]

Quite a few postings above have been from a netadmin's point of view, and I understand their pov. BW is expensive. I however, am a student, and would like to give my perspective. Capping is a pain for users. Asymmetric capping is even worse. I can't convey how annoying it is when your trying to send something to a friend (Large powerpoint presentation from last week comes to mind) and it goes SLOW (course slow is 24KB/sec). People can normally DL here at about 100KB/sec, which means that 3/4 of the bandwidth is going unused, and roughly quadrupling the DL time. I hate that. And as for quotas... ewwww. 1.5 GB a WEEK... I go over that in a day. Mirc, Webrowsing and a little dl really add up.

As for Morpheus and Gnutella... I'm a college student. I'm not rich, and I'm tired of price gouging ($500 for BOOKS!!!!! COME ON!!!!). It is a natural response to it. Leave it be.

PS, If anyone from University of Kentucky IT is reading this, North Campus would kill for a T3 right now.

im a student, and its not just filesharing

[bienfaissant_digital]

Despite what they say, its not just filesharing thats bogging down the networks. for two weeks after school began this year for me i was without a school internet connection because everyone uses the internet all of the time now. Instant messanger, email, voice and videoconferencing, websites (flash etc) an other things have taken over the bandwidth. There is just too much you can do on the inbternet now.

Re:IT's not just students

[baptiste]

This could be for a barrage of reasons

True. However, port usage reports showed it was mostly music sharing/P2P programs. Also - the bandwidth usage was peaking during the day when students were in class...

Re:Why do gamers have to get scrood?

[halo8]

And of course no one cares about games after 9-11 and in a university school wiht the whole columbine thing, why cant there be a study on the benifits on games, stress relife, peer to peer interaction, ect.. ect..

Re:My experience

[PYK]

It boggles my mind to think that these kids got into a university and don't understand that downloading the new N'sync album before it's on store shelves is illegal. Theft is theft, no matter who you're screwing over,...


That depends on where you are in the world. In most places Theft is legally defined as taking something which has physical substance. So downlading an mp3 is not stealing, since you are not talking something from someone else - its copyright infringement - of course local laws may vary.

Its possible its just kids in the US, but in Europe is many adults as well. With emphasis on MANY - the time may come when the lawgivers are forced to accept that the times have changed.

Re:Cut 'em off

[cmkrnl]

Apparently, you havent read what I have been writing.

Given your prior level of abject cluelessness demonstrated previously I am not suprised. How pray tell are you to establish your much vaunted 'ipsec'tunnel across the perimeter when both the firewalls and inside/outside screening routers are dropping udp/500, GRE & ip protocols 50/51 smartarse ?

No security admin with even a smidgen of competence will allow vpn/gre/pptp/whatever tunnel to traverse perimeter security from the LAN to the internet or vice versa. One might as well throw the damn firewalls away otherwise.

Especially considering how trivial it is to split something like a PPTP tunnel and now have a direct ROUTED connection from a foreign network into the LAN.

Tunnels in any properly designed environment are only allowed to start & terminate in a DMZ, or directly on the firewall where access to/from such tunnels is strictly regulated.

Curmudgeon